Contrary Mary eBook

CHAPTER I

In Which Silken Ladies Ascend One Stairway, and
a Lonely Wayfarer Ascends Another and Comes Face to
Face With Old Friends.

The big house, standing on a high hill which overlooked
the city, showed in the moonlight the grotesque outlines
of a composite architecture. Originally it had
been a square substantial edifice of Colonial simplicity.
A later and less restrained taste had aimed at a
castellated effect, and certain peaks and turrets had
been added. Three of these turrets were excrescences
stuck on, evidently, with an idea of adornment.
The fourth tower, however, rounded out and enlarged
a room on the third floor. This room was one
of a suite, and the rooms were known as the Tower
Rooms, and were held by those who had occupied them
to be the most desirable in the barn-like building.

To-night the house had taken on an unwonted aspect
of festivity. Its spaciousness was checkered
by golden-lighted windows. Delivery wagons and
automobiles came and went, some discharging loads of
deliciousness at the back door, others discharging
loads of loveliness at the front.

Following in the wake of one of the front door loads
of fluttering femininity came a somewhat somber pedestrian.
His steps lagged a little, so that when the big door
opened, he was still at the foot of the terrace which
led up to it. He waited until the door was shut
before he again advanced. In the glimpse that
he thus had of the interior, he was aware of a sort
of pink effulgence, and in that shining light, lapped
by it, and borne up, as it were, by it toward the
wide stairway, he saw slender girls in faint-hued frocks—­a
shimmering celestial company.

As he reached the top of the terrace the door again
flew open, and he gave a somewhat hesitating reason
for his intrusion.

“I was told to ask for Miss Ballard—­Miss
Mary Ballard.”

It seemed that he was expected, and that the guardian
of the doorway understood the difference between his
business and that of the celestial beings who had
preceded him.

He was shown into a small room at the left of the
entrance. It was somewhat bare, with a few law
books and a big old-fashioned desk. He judged
that the room might have been put to office uses, but
to-night the desk was heaped with open boxes, and
odd pieces of furniture were crowded together, so
that there was left only a small oasis of cleared
space. On the one chair in this oasis, the somber
gentleman seated himself.

He had a fancy, as he sat there waiting, that neither
he nor this room were in accord with the things that
were going on in the big house. Outside of the
closed door the radiant guests were still ascending
the stairway on shining wings of light. He could
hear the music of their laughter, and the deeper note
of men’s voices, rising and growing fainter
in a sort of transcendent harmony.